How to fix Samsung Galaxy S5 that won’t boot up after owner tried to restart

This post will address one of the most common issues Samsung Galaxy S5 owners encountered after the lollipop update–phone won’t boot up. But before we go to the proper troubleshooting, I just want to make things clearer in this post. The terms “boot up” and “power up” are totally different.

When you say “boot up,” it means the phone’s components are fired up but the screen remains blank or got stuck somewhere without continuing to load the system. The term “power up” refers specifically to the phone that won’t turn on no matter what. In other words, the phone that won’t power up is a dead phone.

Our reader said in his email that he recently downloaded the lollipop update but the phone would heat up to the point that it would overheat. Naturally so, once the phone overheats, it would freeze, lag, become sluggish or shut down to prevent further damage.

According to him, he attempted to fix the freezing problem by restarting the phone but it won’t boot up any longer. We ruled out that it’s just a “boot up” problem because the phone was functioning fine prior to the attempted restart. Apparently, the hardware is fine and it’s obviously the firmware that is at fault here.

This post will guide you through troubleshooting this problem and while I want to get this issue fixed, I will not suggest any procedure that may compromise the safety of the device. All procedures will be directed to making the phone boot up. So you could understand better what the problem is, here’s the actually message from our reader:

“After downloading the lollipop update recently, my phone would heat up and become overheated to the point that it would freeze. So to fix the solution I decided to restart the phone. This did not work so I decided manually restarting it by completely turning it off and back on again would be better. I turned it off and tried to turn it back on again, but now it won’t even boot up. There is absolutely no response from any lights, the logo does not appear, and the phone does not vibrate no matter what buttons I hold down. I tried holding down the volume up button, home key, and power key and there was still no response.”

Before we go any further, if you have other concerns with your phone, visit our Samsung Galaxy S5 Troubleshooting page as we’ve addressed hundreds of problems in the past. Find issues that are the same or related to yours and try the solutions we provided. If those solutions won’t work, then fill up this form and hit Submit to contact us. Be sure to include all necessary details so we can provide appropriate and more accurate solutions.

Troubleshooting

The purpose of this troubleshooting guide is to know if the phone can still boot up. The owner said the phone was heating up or even overheating, so if all troubleshooting procedures fail, there is a chance the overheating may have somehow affected some of the phone’s hardware components.

The first thing you should do is the soft reset to drain electricity stored in some components and refresh the phone’s memory.

Remove the back cover and pull the battery out.

While the battery is removed, press and hold the Power key for 30 seconds.

Place the battery back in and the back cover.

Attempt to turn the phone on.

If the phone didn’t boot up or if it didn’t respond, then try to plug it in to charge. There is a chance the battery has been totally depleted as such is the case to phones that are overheating. Of course, the very purpose of this step is to make sure the battery has enough charge to power up the phone.

Once the device is plugged in, check if all charging signs show up like the usual charging icon and the LED indicator at the top of the screen. With or without these signs, leave the phone plugged for at least ten minutes to make sure there’s enough charge.

If those charging signs won’t show up, it means there’s a real issue with either the firmware (please note that the firmware plays a big part in charging the phone) or the hardware. But assuming that the device did charge properly but still won’t turn on after ten minutes of charging, try to boot it in safe mode to temporarily disable all downloaded apps. If the safe mode remedy didn’t help, try booting it in recovery mode. It won’t load the usual Android GUI but it will tell you if the hardware is fine or not. Besides, you can wipe the cache partition and/or perform hard reset if you were able to make the phone boot in this mode.

On the other hand, if the phone didn’t show the charging signs, just attempt to boot it in recovery mode. If that failed, then try using a different battery. At this point, there’s no guarantee that it’s a battery problem so if you could just borrow from a friend, that will save you from spending a few dollars. The other option is, of course, seek help from a technician especially if you don’t want to buy a new battery for testing.

However, if the phone powers up but can’t boot up successfully, try booting the phone in safe mode and/or recovery mode. If your Galaxy S5 can boot in any of these modes, there’s a chance you fix the problem with master reset. Otherwise, you also need a technician to reinstall the firmware but based on your description, I think the problem couldn’t reach this far.

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer: we are not affiliated with the device manufacturers or phone carriers we mention in any way, all suggestions are based on our own experience and research, you may use our advice at your own discretion.